Tales of the Walking Wounded

“The divorce was like a car accident I heard happen behind me.... I couldn’t say how it had happened or who might have been at fault ... I could only describe how they looked after the collision.”

--Jen Robinson, from “Split: Stories From a Generation Raised on Divorce” (Contemporary Books)

*

The moment parents divorce, the life of their child becomes a succession of splits: emotions ebb and flow from one parent to the other; home, in most cases, is no longer one house but two; and memories are slotted into “before” and “after” categories.

Much has been researched and written about the long-term impacts of divorce on children--the facts and interpretations always filtered through the eyes and ears of a social scientist, psychologist or academic. Some experts insist the psychological and emotional damage on children is irreversible; others maintain it is a traumatic event people can grow and recover from.

But little has been heard from the children themselves.

As a member of the generation of children who grew up amid the divorce revolution of the 1970s, Ava Chin has always wanted to hear from her peers. “When I was a kid, I heard all the dour statistics of what it was like,” said Chin, 32, who edited the essays that make up “Split,” a new anthology of intimate accounts by Gen-X writers from families of divorce.

“We were more likely to drop out of school, get pregnant when we’re young and get married and then divorced. But none of these things fit my profile or that of my friends when we were in school,” Chin said. “I had always wondered what it was like for the other kids. What was it like for them to watch their home life split in two?”

Chin, a former editor of Vibe and Spin magazines who recently moved to Los Angeles from New York, set out to find out by tapping writers in their 20s and 30s across the country. She asked them to write about how their parents’ divorce affected them at the time and now, knowing full well it would prove to be a daunting assignment. She too had been trying to complete such an essay for 15 years; her father left her mother when she was pregnant with Chin, who did not meet him until she was 27.

“Even for professional writers, it was really difficult to write these essays and deal with past issues and write about them objectively,” said Chin, a postgraduate literature and creative writing student at USC. “But they all identified as a kid of divorce and were enthusiastic about trying to write about it--until they actually sat down to write it. Mine came out in different permutations. At first, they were all too emotional, too overwrought. It got to the point I really doubted I was going to be able to do it, which is why I didn’t pressure anybody else.”

As the writers of “Split” poignantly depict in stories that cover everything from their parents’ breakup to their own abilities (or lack thereof) to commit, divorce--and its aftermath--is a gray world in which there are few common experiences, no absolute truths and no easy answers.

“We just hated having two families where we’d had one before,” wrote Matt Briggs, a fiction writer who lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle. “We hated being two different people, where before we could just be our parents’ kids.”

But within the pages of “Split” there also is resilience and hope, which is what Chin wanted to portray in her own revealing account, “The Missing.”

“An essay forces you to be objective about the past and helps put the past in perspective and enables you to move on,” Chin said. “The worst thing is to carry this baggage from childhood to adulthood. I hope that other kids of divorce will be able to look at it and see their own stories, as well as help the people who are involved with [those kids] gain a better understanding of them.” For freelance writer and editor Michelle Patient, growing up meant dealing with the divorce of her parents, their weddings to other people and the subsequent endings of those second marriages. None of it ever made any sense to her. Still, at 32, Patient has settled down into marriage and motherhood.

“I do believe that love can endure if you give it room to evolve,” Patient wrote in her essay, “Rootless.” “I learned this from my grandparents--my true relationship role models--who continued to love each other, through wars and illnesses and affairs and children and travels, for nearly 60 years.”

*

Appalled by Responses

The idea for Chin’s book struck her four years ago as she sat on a panel of half a dozen other twentysomethings for an HBO talk-show pilot that never aired. Among the questions posed to the diverse urban group: Is marriage still relevant?

“I was appalled by the responses of everyone around me,” Chin said. “They were saying that marriage is just a contract, a social institution, and that it doesn’t mean anything.”

Chin also knew she wanted to have kids but was frightened by the prospect. “One of the things that had jolted me out of thinking that I was going to be young forever, that I could just work on my career forever,” she said, “was thinking about becoming a mother and wondering how could I be a good parent if I don’t even know what happened between my parents.”

Most of the writers, in fact, discovered they knew very little about the problems that led to their parents’ separations. But all could describe in detail the day their parents announced they were divorcing. In “Entropy Factor,” Alexandra Wolf explains she never understood why her mother left her father because she doesn’t recall them ever arguing. Her 9-year-old brother, she wrote, was so “blissfully unaware that when they called us in for the big talk he thought they were going to announce that we were getting a canoe.”

Several of the writers, including Wolf, fretted that their essays would expose too much and hurt loved ones. Wolf even asked her parents to promise they would never read her essay. Others worried they did not know the facts and therefore could not write the truth.

“It’s impossible to boil it down and say this is what happened,” said Wolf, who lives in Brooklyn. “There are infinite varieties for how things play out and infinite personalities in the world. I spent a lot of time in anguish over my parents and how to tell this story without hurting anybody. It made me realize that there was a lot of stuff that I was still upset about, and now I’m angry about things I wasn’t angry about before. It wasn’t so much denial, but a failure to connect the dots between certain problems I have now, or patterns I see in myself. I had never examined my life through that lens before.”

*

A Game of Chance

Neither had John Stinson, a fiction writer and fund-raiser for Teach for America in Baltimore whose parents separated when he was 21 and in college. On the verge of marriage five years ago, Stinson realized he didn’t know what he wanted in a wife and had no idea how to live up to the demands of commitment. Now, at least, he knows he wants to be married, although he doesn’t lose sight of how unresolved and unsettled he still feels about his parents’ divorce. In his essay, Stinson compared marriage to a game of chance. “There were millions of combinations ... the pairs were parts of a wheel game. Sometimes you got red, sometimes black,” he wrote. “Why should I take it more seriously than that?” But at the end of the essay, he does decide to take it seriously. “I want to dismiss the notion that it’s a game altogether now that I am a potential participant. That is the cry of the solipsist. I am certainly guilty of that. It’s a lack of faith and courage, two things I probably will need to make a marriage work.”

Dennis Lowe, director of the Center for the Family at Pepperdine University in Malibu, has read most of the books and studies about divorce in the U.S. No researcher, he said, could portray the repercussions of divorce on children more thoroughly than the children who have lived through it, matured, and processed it.

“There is always the possibility that when a researcher is conducting interviews or research on a subject, results can be filtered through the researcher’s presumptions, the questions asked, or the interpretations they used to make sense of the facts,” Lowe said. “When you have people telling their own story, you can see the complexity of the issue and the nature of a person’s experience. There’s a benefit to this even for those of us in the social sciences.”

Chin’s father married and divorced three more times after he left her mother. Chin now maintains contact with him even though they are not close. Once, she asked him why he had married so many times. His answer: “You fall in love. You decide to marry. If it doesn’t work out, you get a divorce.”

“He made it sound so simple, like an if-then statement in basic mathematics,” Chin wrote at the end of her essay. “But I suspect not even he truly believes this, that you can walk away so unaffected, debt-free.”